Firefall team hires Morgan Romine for eSports focus

Developer Red 5 Studios hopes to make the upcoming free-to-play shooter Firefall ready for the tournament scene. To do so, the company has hired Morgan "Rhoulette" Romine, founder of the Frag Dolls, Ubisoft's all-female professional gaming team. Romine visited the Shacknews offices to discuss her new role and what it means for players of Firefall.
"We have a lot of guys on the team who are former pro gamers," Romine told me in an interview last week. Her official title at Red 5 Studios is eSports Maven. She's extremely animated during our conversation, but it isn't nerves going from a team dedicated to game promotion to a new management role focused on an important element to the most dedicated game players, she's excited. "Everybody on the team takes competitive gaming really seriously," she admits.
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Romine says that it's important for the team at Red 5 to build a game from the "ground up" with competitive gaming in mind. "My role on the team is to champion the eSports spirit," Romine tells me.
What this means is that it's up to Romine to interact with the community to ensure their eSports needs are being met. Romine's task is to take all of the feedback focused on tournaments, clans, and spectator modes and help push for those features on the development side. "We want to make it so that Firefall is an amazing experience, not only for the competitive players but also for the people who would be interested in watching it."

Firefall has systems built within it for Red 5 to eventually branch out into local and big money tournaments, Romine says. "We want to have an expansive, global tournament presence with Firefall."
"I will be helping to advise developers about what the gamers want from the competitive side, but we will also be integrating the game into exiting leagues, potentially, existing tournament structures, possibly. We're going to be building it into the eSports world that already exits and revolutionizing it."
How Red 5 plans to revolutionize the growing eSports market is unclear, but it has time to develop its plan. The free-to-play shooter is scheduled to launch officially sometime in December.
For more on Firefall, read the recent news about pets being added to the game, watch our video interview with Red 5 CEO Mark Kern, or visit the game's official site.